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Friday, September 26, 2014

I Tracked Every Purchase for a Year and Here's What I Have to Say About That (7qt)

A little over a year ago, we finally decided we were sick of only sorta kinda knowing how we were spending our money. With a house full of kids and a new(er)-house pipe dream on the horizon, I decided we were finally going to make a budget and stick to our budget. But guess what? I couldn't. And I'll tell you why. Because...

(1)You can't know what you should spend until you know what you're already spending.

Before I made the magical spreadsheet, I spent an embarassing amount of time asking the internet how much a person "should" spend on certain categories and how much a different person "could" manage to spend if they were very thrifty and then multiplying that by the number of people in our house and dividing it by the coefficient of pi squared and carrying the one and crossing my t's only to determine that we've definitely never had enough money and probably we're all starving.

Which we're not.

But instead of scrapping the whole idea (that was my first instinct, promise promise) I decided that fine, I'll just have to go ahead and keep track of every. single. purchase. Period.

Dang we make a lot of purchases. I don't just go shopping once a week and then never buy anything after that. Mostly I blame this on Amazon Prime, but it's like "here's this book I forgot to get! Better order it." Then 18 minutes later "oooooooh, is his birthday really in three days? Quick! Order that random emergency vehicle." And right there you've got two transactions and two weeks later you want to cry and give up.

Don't give up.

Push through. I believe in you. If I can do it, queen of never ever ever finishing a series of blog posts I've ever promised to serialize for you, then you can do it.

(3)Pick an interval that works for you.

But how? How do you just start? Just, like, pull out those crumpled receipts from the bottom of your purse and brush the crumbs off and junk? No sir.

Here's the thing (All of you Ramsey peeps avert your eyes!): we never use cash. So instead of receipts, all of our transactions are online with the name of the establishment from which the purchases were made and I can say "Honey, what did you get at Family Farm and Home for seven bazillion dollars?" and he can say "Why, that gold encrusted dog food I insist on feeding our precious poochies, of course."

Anyway, back to the interval. I do ours once a month because Tommy gets paid once a month on the 15th. As soon as the current paycheck gets deposited, I go back and enter all the expenses and income from the 15th of the previous month thru the 14th of the current month. As I subtract what we spent, the income amount decreases right before my bugging out little eyes because excel is magical and does math for you.

It takes forever. I hate it. But I like the results, so..... #resultsorientedforthewin

Lizzy is making these on the fly with air dry clay. I cannot even STAND how cute the mustache cat is. Zoinks.

(4) It's like that food log thing- knowing I'm gonna have to write it down makes me spend less.

I'm not kidding. The fewer transactions I have to enter in the wee hours of the morn the better. I save money just by making myself do this terrible task. Genius, right?

(5)Taxes!

Doing this makes finishing your taxes a whole lot easier, y'all. Just make sure your chart (that sounds less scary than "spreadsheet" doesn't it?) has categories for things that TurboTax is going to interrogate you about, like charitable contributions, unreimbursed medical expenses, and other fancy things like that, so that you can just BOOP: open it up and slap that number in there. Magic.

Now before you say it, I know Quicken and Microsoft Money and all these other programs exist. But they're just so...cumbersome. And you have to have that actual program installed in other places, right? With my excel spreadsheet, I can save it to my dropbox folder and open it up on any computer anywhere and it uses, what, like 2 computer brain power units to run? Dat's how I likes it.

Intent: to take before pics of the den sofas so I can share afters with you when I talk too much about staging the house to sell. Reality: this 4 year old and that outfit and the hair and wow, the mess. Just so much of all of that.

(6)Peace!

Instead of being in a constant state of panic about money (guilty), you will sort of feel like you have a handle on what's happening. Because even though we were managing to feed and clothe our children and buy fuel and pay our propane bills, I always felt like we were teetering on the edge of financial ruin and so even though I made purchases, I still stressed out about them. "This is it! This is the pair of $4 grocery store flip flops that's gonna send us to the poor house. I don't even know what a poor house is, but I'm gonna get sent there, I know it. Stupid flip flops."

You see? Unstable. Bad.

Or maybe at first you won't feel peace because you'll discover you ARE overspending. But then you can do something about it and create your peace that way. We realized, after an entire year of tracking, that the quickest, easiest way for us to save money was to not eat out. And I'm not talking about eating out at Texas Land and Cattle or something. I'm talking even pizza to-go on a Friday night. Dude, that gets EXPENSIVE. I cannot even deal. Even a meal for all of us at the golden arches costs THIRTY FOUR DOLLARS. For a single very terrible meal. Wow. No.

Like maybe buying a house? True story. I would not have been able to definitively say that we could afford to take this money and that money and this money over here and move it around here and...yes, yes we can get that new house. I mean the loan officer was like "You totally can afford way more than this." but she was wrong. I knew how much we could afford because I had my special document of truth at my fingertips. But the fact that I could say what we could spend at all? Fantastic. Amazing. Best.

If you are taking a ride on the do-better-at-life train, I highly recommend this terrible, horrible project. It'll be worth it.

66 comments
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Gulp. You make it sound so...do-able. I know I really need to do this. This might just be the push I needed. Just prepare your fb inbox for an onslaught of whining messages...er..."commiseration," mmm'kay?

Yes, please! I would love to see the catagories on your spreadsheet. I keep thinking I'm going to keep track of everything, but I haven't started because I haven't decided how I want to keep track. Bad excuse, right?

I would LOOOOVE to see these categories. I feel like if I could just sneakily use someone else's instead of coming up with my own, I'd be much more apt to actually do this. (Which needs to happen...asap.)

Yes, Thank you! A screenshot would be great! I think I get too specific on categories and end up with too many. I have been wanting to do this for quite some time. I agree, I do better with a credit card. I can't seem to account for cash, or hang onto it. Sorry Dave Ramsey :(

I love this, Dwija. We are Ramsey peeps, but I am not a purist, and I totally think that someday down the road, I would like to do this. For me, being the child-in-an-adult body who just wants to spend all the monies, the most important thing to do was to set limits. Once I feel like a grown-up-in-a-grown-up body (as in, some self control), I think doing this will make a lot of sense.

You should try Mint! It's free and online and tracks all your spending and income for you. It works especially well if you don't use a lot of cash. We've been using it for a few years and it's really helpful. It gives you a whole snapshot of your financial picture without having to go to each website individually and its easy to see how much you are spending by category.

Great post, Dwija! You made budget and tracking spending sound so fun. I mean, the end result. The getting started definitely is a little tough. We have had a set budget our entire married life (13 yrs now) and I will not lie that as the family size has grown and the income not as much, it still can be scary in those birthday/Christmas/wedding/so-much-going-on months. I've just learned to live this way, even if it is not always 'fun' to say 'no, I can't buy (xyz) right now.' I also know that this year was tough with a new dryer, a chicken coop we built ourselves/chickens, kids needing clothes, etc. It helped though to see where (and how fast) that money was going. It also made me want to work harder to get some money back into savings after using it for these other various needs. I remember a couple years ago having a conversation with an acquaintance and I mentioned economy and budget. She laughed and said "oh, we quit sticking to a budget years ago! When we had kids we didn't do that any more." I'll admit I was jealous. I even came home and told hubby maybe we should just scrap the whole thing. We managed money well, we'd be fine. I then had the whole conversation with my hubby and hashed it over. I realized being the planner I am and the creature of habit he is, we couldn't change our ways and go back. We couldn't NOT budget and try to stick to it. I remind myself of this as I track every stinkin' purchase each month (I use MoneyWisePro app on my tablet). I feel more secure knowing exactly where the money is being spent, whether wisely or foolishly.

Again, thanks for sharing your post and the great reminder that this is all worth it.

If you have a smartphone, I'd recommend using Toshl to track your expenses. It's pretty much exactly like tracking what you eat and using that MyFitnessPal app. It's helped us stay mostly in check this year, but like you said, it's pretty much impossible to keep to a strict budget in real life, especially when a new baby enters the scene. Anyway, it might be more convenient for you than just doing it once a month. You can just quick enter the grocery or gas or whatever amount in your phone and it's there. And you can check and see how much you've spent that month so you know whether you need to reign it in or not. I prefer not! Oh, also, it sends you a little reminder message, like a text, when you haven't used it in a while (read: you've been a bad girl and ignored how much you've been spending.... this has never happened to me...) Anyway, I thought I'd share because I could completely relate to everything you wrote in this post. It's not fun tracking expenses but it does bring peace of mind!

If I ever get a smartphone, I will look into this! Right now I have an ipod, so I can only use it at home or a place with a wifi connection, so it's just as easy to use a computer (and makes me less obsessed....because I can get a little obsessed otherwise. Issues!)

I am such a money nerd, I swear. I have tracked every purchase we have ever made since we were married in June 2000. Such peace when every thing is up to date. Such anxiety when I inevitably fall behind while pregnant. We have Microsoft Money, but I want a new program.

The best part is when other people, i.e. loan officers, car salesmen, whoever, try to tell you about your money and you bust out the spreadsheet on them. I know the truth. I can handle the truth.

I see a couple other people suggested Mint.com already. But I'm going to second or third that. We've found that to be a HUGE help because it tracks all those debit card purchases for you. And then you can go in and add something if you paid cash. I'm really bad about making sure we keep receipts for everything so this was a much more efficient way for us to track our spending. Plus, your budget line turns RED if you go over. And I hate that...so much lol

Does it track credit card purchases, too? I don't use my bank debit card either, we use a credit card that offers cash back and pay it off at the end of every month and then checks (of course) for the things you can't pay with a card.

I just really like being the total boss of how my spreadsheet works and I can still look at it even if the internet is out or whatever (although obvi I can't enter purchases at that time because...derp...no internet to check accounts!).

You can enter other accounts into Mint. We used it for awhile, but I didn't like it. My husband would only get paid once a month at the end of the month and it would calculate the budget weird because of that.

Okay, yeah, I don't know if that'll work for us because we also have seasonal expenses like property tax (twice per year) and propane fill ups (4 times per year). So I have to really pay attention to what's happening and not let a program make decisions for me.

I tried to comment above about how much I like Mint, but the internet ate it!

It's great for budgeting irregular expenses. I pay my phone bill 3 months at a time to make it a little cheaper, and Mint creates a category in my budget that sets aside 1/3 of the phone bill each month. It works the same for the car insurance, which is twice a year.

If you have a really irregular income it's a little more complicated, but while I fall into that category, I think most people don't.

MINT!!! We've been on it for years. I love it. Mint will allow you to enter odd budget elements. They will say "When does this happen?" and you will say "Once every six months" and they will say "OK!" And the graphs! Oh the graphs!

Mint will calculate everything automatically but it also allows you to change whatever you want manually, and you have to change some stuff manually if you want the picture to be accurate. I actually remember talking to Blythe Fike about Mint once and she said she and her husband have totally different accounts tracking the exact same data just because they like to organize it so differently. Thus: Flexible.

TRY it. You'll LIKE it.

And if you don't like it, then delete it and carry on with your mensal excel party. :)

We finally did Dave Ramsey's class this past spring. We're not purist either but it really really helped my husband and I to set goals keep track keep to the budget etc. We're using YNAB now instead of quicken and excel and whatever else. We love that we can enter transactions on my husband's phone or my ipad and it will sync with the home computer as soon as we are in wifi zone. It also has the budget right there and we know if a category balance is too low that it must come out of another one etc. My hubby gets paid once a month too. Today is our payday. We spent about 4 minutes last night going over the budget. It's taken a good 6 months to get to this point and we've made a lot of progress on getting stuff paid off. Now I'd love to move especially thinking about the kids in the house all winter but know it's really 18 months out before we can do it and still meet our goals.

I would love to do this! I'm just too afraid! I know we are spending too much (as I'm looking for money at the end of pay day so that all the bills can be paid) yet I can't come up with any other ways to save. (Besides to stop buying books but I don't want to talk about that!)

We are Ramsey people and we don't really use cash either! We use YNAB for our budget which is nice because it has a smartphone app so we can enter our spending as we do it and then I reconcile it with the statements later. Budgeting is the best!

I died laughing at this post. Once a month Tim does his "WHAT DID YOU BUY ON AMAZON FOR $?? ON AUGUST????" ...two minutes later "WHAT DID YOU AT TARGET FOR?? ON AUGUST??" also the loan officer comment. We are looking for a new house and the two mortgage guys we've talked have both said "you know you can afford waaaay more than what you want" we chuckle and try explain to the 20 something childless loan officer that we have 5 kids and a dog so no we really can't.

LOL! I don't feel like a crazy person reading all the comments, but ESPECIALLY these two! My husband and I do that to each other! "We owe WHAT??!?!???!!!!!!" We both defend our occasional expenses buttttttt. One income. Kids. Animals. #grownuptime :D

I enjoy when God uses the blogging world to talk to me about what I am crying to Him about. I don't know why, but money management has always been my biggest struggle as a grown up. Nothing makes you feel more like a dummy than realizing you did not stick to the budget. Again. Maybe a spreadsheet would help me. But,thank you for talking about this with such honesty. :)

Virginia, I know how you feel! I would suggest Dave Ramsey (I know, I know)- I learned so much about sticking to a budget, and the nice thing about using the "envelope system" is that you budget, and then when the money's gone in that category, it's gone. No overspending. After I got into that habit, figured out how much money I actually needed to spend in each area of my life... then I could adjust to be more convenient.

If you don't wanna do cash (don't blame you there), I know some people who just keep little papers in their wallet with the total amount for, say, food, and then cross off as they spend. Or Monopoly money, but that seems like another step.

Don't feel like a dummy! Lots of people have trouble with the budget thing! You can do it!

If you bank at a major financial institution you can use Mint. We use our credit card for everything and cheques sometimes and it tracks both and auto categorizes for you. I keep receipts for shopping trips that have more than one category and then edit that item at home. You can also start a budget for things that are one time expenses like water bills and taxes and it will remind you how much needs to be set aside for it per month. We started using it when we were renting and wanted to buy. We had only one kid at the time but even then I was able to tell the bank that, no we couldn't afford what they said we could. I've since stopped looking at it but if there is one thing you will learn from budgeting it's that eating out is VERY expensive! Is a good place to start if you feel overwhelmed and don't know what categories to track.

We did the Dave Ramsey program in college, and it was really helpful for College "Stressed about Everything" Adrie. And then we got married, got jobs, and my finances shifted significantly. And we get interest for using our debit card X number of times a month, so we don't do cash much anymore, either.

Okay, I'm intrigued. We've been doing the cash envelope and budget thing for the last couple years and it works much better than the whole lotta nothing we were doing before that but it's still not perfect. There are still months where an unexpected expense comes up and I get all stressed out about it. And I still have no idea what specifically our money goes to on an annual basis, kwim? We're finally going to have to start itemizing our taxes next year (clergy pay and taxes are structured oddly but DH won't have clergy status anymore thankfully) and it's been stressing me out. Tracking purchases could really help.

My question: so how did you keep track of future big expenses you knew were coming? We have big estimated tax payments due quarterly, some bills bi-monthly, and of course utilities are significant but vary a bit each month. So like say I'm tracking my spending and all is going well and then on the 20th of the month I realize "oh crap, we now have a $130 water bill to pay that I forgot about?" Or do you keep track of those with a calendar or something on paper too?

I may be back to pester with more questions, cause you're not at all too busy with 6 kids and a new house and a bazillian chickens and ducks running around to answer a random bad-at-budgeting blog follower ;)

We do cash for a lot, but eh have a bunch of smallish savings accounts for expenses we know we have coming. My DH gets paid once/month too, so we pay all of our bills on/near the first of the month. Then we have auto deductions of certain amounts to various accounts. For example, $50 to car replacement account, $50/month goes to car repair/maintenance/bike maintenance, $60 to medical account, $50 for Chrismtas/gifts, etc. So we plan ahead and really only use cash for the things we know we need every month (groceries, restaurants, etc.).

Does that help? I'm a relative newbie to this, so I'm sure there's more than one way to do it.

Ugh. Conviction. I am the SAME way about feeling guilty about spending money. Like, it's really bad. And because spending ANY money makes me feel guilty, it's the same if I buy bananas or, a pair of jeans. Don't worry…I'm in counseling. ;) But this may be a helpful thing as well!

It's a great idea. I just went back and did the last six months of transactions based on bank and cc statements. It was a shocker as to how much we're spending on food and eating out. Even if only my hubs eats out, it's 5-13 dollars per meal. And that does add up quickly. We're working on a budget. We're currently using the Gail Vaz Oxlade approach, but there's a lot of similarities between Dave and Gail. http://www.gailvazoxlade.com/resources.html

I feel guilty about spending any money, but discovered through my analysis that hubs does not... at all. Once we figure out what our budget should be, and apply some brakes and use a cash only system for a while, I think we'll switch to YNAB! I love it... but it seems like it's too many steps from where we are right now to where I want to be. And I need significant buy in from my hubs.

We love You Need A Budget!! We started with Excel and moved over to YNAB. We even use it for my husbands business. We also do everything on credit cards to track purchases and they can auto download. You can also get the apps for phones and tablets. Highly recommend. Made for the average non-accountant like myself.

I love this topic! I get kind of giddy when I get to update our budget each month. I actually keep track of our spending as we spend. I'm a receipt nazi, so my husband has become very good about remembering to get a receipt (or when he can't he remembers the amount that needs to be entered into our spreadsheet). I actually wrote 2 posts on this topic a while back (our line items have changed slightly, but it's still pretty accurate for what we do):

Amanda - I think the key to not having big expenses stress you out is planning in advance. If you know you have a water bill every 3 months it's important to set aside money each month to cover it when it comes up. I think this is especially important for car and house maintenance because those come at random intervals and can be pretty big expenses when they do come up.

We also use Excel which I LOVE because I can create categories as needed and sometimes I'll spend money in 2 or even 3 categories within one purchase (SO easy to do at Target) so I'm able to itemize everything once I get home. I mainly like that I have complete control about how everything is laid out and how we categorize everything.And, I never thought to store our budget in Dropbox - genius! I'm (finally!) going to go figure out how to use Dropbox :)

Thanks for the inspiration! I know in my heart of hearts that we should be doing something like this, but I keep shoving the idea aside. We bought a new house two years ago, so overnight we went from having decent savings to, like, no savings. Which was fine for a while, but now it's making me antsy -- growing family! -- don't know what will happen! -- need to be saving! So (deep breath) I guess it's time for me to be doing something about it. Ugh.

You have had the most perfectly timed posts for me lately. My husband is in graduate school, and we get our loan money at the beginning of every trimester, which is kind of nice, but kind of not, because, hello big chunk of money that must be spread out over 4 months. We've talked about tracking our spending so that we have a better handle on our expenses for after graduation, but haven't moved on it. Thanks for the kick in the pants to get my act together. We use debit cards almost exclusively, so I might check out Mint (because I don't know how to use Excel).

We've been doing this since the beginning of the year and it really has helped A LOT. I currently use Ace Money Lite to keep track of our transactions (I used to use Mint, but it's been super glitchy lately), and GoodBudget on my phone. I can't do cash envelopes (hello multi-category purchases, what do I do with you???) but GoodBudget has virtual envelopes that help me see where I'm at throughout the month. The free version only has 10 "envelopes" but that's enough to keep track of major things like groceries and gas. Yay for budgets and spending within our means!

I wanted to add that last year we did the Compass Financial Ministries Bible study, and boy did that help a lot!! It has the practical stuff a la Dave Ramsey, but also really drives home the fact that we are stewards of what God has given us. It was eye-opening in so many ways. If anyone has a chance to do one, I highly recommend it.

So many mentioning the budgeting! haha, My husband and I have said we were going to get serious about getting a budget together these past two weekends. Maybe our third time around will be the one! Will reference back to your wisdom ;) thanks for the nudge!

Known future expenses as much as possible we put money aside each month, as in $100 each month towards the quarterly water bill. YNAB tracks this balance across months for you. We have future goals of getting a balance for categories like medical or auto so that if something happened that we had to pay several hundred dollars to the deductible/repair we would have something set aside. We're not there yet because we're trying to wipe out the nasty credit card balance. We do have a little emergency fund if needed. When something comes up like my husband's 300 bifocals we get that this month and then not do much in say clothing or alas books. Also for every month type bills you can enter a recurring transaction, as in the mortgage that comes out automatically on the 5th. YNAB offers a trial offer and all of us that use it can give you a linky for a discount on purchase if you're interested.

Gah. I know I need to do a better job of tracking our expenses. We use Mint, but we still don't follow our budget as closely as we really should... and I know it's mostly my fault. We're due for a conversation about money/savings/budgeting for projects, so maybe I'll start soon!

I totally did that for like two whole years, and I had our future budgets and savings and everything all mapped out too, and we paid off a ton of debt and bought a house and stuff. But then I discovered Mint.com...which basically does all of those things for you and you just mess around with it like once a week or so to make sure it's categorizing things correctly. And I love how easy it is. For future reference, if you ever get sick of your spreadsheet.

I'm also on the YNAB train!! Choo choo! Let me give you some background here: I have always been obsessed with money. How much I have, how much I don't have, how much I'm giving away, how much I need. (I taught a budgeting class to military families for the better part of 2 years, and it was the best job I've ever had. Does that give me credibility? Good.)

In my senior year of college, I set up an Excel spreadsheet like yours (much less categories due to much less needs, I'm sure). I did that for a few years, then switched to Mint. I had a love/hate relationship with Mint. I don't have to enter stuff? Great. HOWEVER, it was a REACTIVE look at money--where the money WENT instead of a PROACTIVE approach--tell the money where to GO. I also could never tell if all our monthly bills got paid because it was just a chronological look at everything. So finally I got on board with YNAB. It goes on sale on Steam twice a year for $15, so your best bet now is to wait until New Year's to get that deal.

YNAB has an app (that is linked to dropbox) so you can input your purchases on the fly and then when you come back into home wi-fi zone, it syncs up with the spreadsheet on your computer. You can also see the balances in your categories on the app (without using data). On the actual software, you can change around categories all the time. You can also set up 'rainy day' funds, like putting a set monthly amount into your property tax or propane fill-up things. We have an HOA fee once a year, so I set aside like $20/mo. for that.

Thanks to YNAB we knew we'd be okay when my husband wanted to QUIT HIS MISERABLE JOB and go back to grad school. I got a job and was able to take our rainy day 'children's activities' fund and move it into 'monthly expenses' for daycare expenses.

I literally have not found someone using YNAB who doesn't love it. It's got graphs and reports and all the jazz, too.

If I were a sweet LDS Mommy Blogger I would write 'preach' in the fancy parentheses.... but I'm just a girl with //no regerts// (best tattoo meme ever?). YOU ARE A FREAKING PROPHET, d-double-jeezy. Thank you for the encouraging post and adorable photos.

oh, dear. I just saw that you wrote preach, you sweet undercover Mormon, teehee! :) I was a YNABer and really found it exhilarating. We should return to that, and your detailed victory here helps to visualize it.

If you use a Mac, consider iBank. All bank and cc transactions download with one click. My task is assigning them to categories. Produces reports and graphs suitable for taping to the fridge. (Why should kids' artwork get all the real estate?)

Is that code for "doesn't want to talk about the future"? "hates to be tied down"? Because having prudently saved for the future makes me way happier-go-lucky than I'd be if we were always overdrawn/afraid of expenses coming up.

I've been doing this for awhile also - but I do use Quicken. We've used it for years, so it's totally manageable and easy for me at this point. We also do not use cash - we put everything on one credit card each month, I track all spending, we know how much we can put on the card and then we pay it off every month. Mostly because it's a good way to keep track of our budget because I can go right on line and see the balance. And we get points for everything, so that helps with travel, etc. But I totally agree with everything - we had to tighten things up considerably last year for about 10 months and it wasn't as horrible as I thought because I knew exactly where to trim. And I agree about the eating out - we can't even do the CHEAPEST fast food without dropping $45.

UGH, this is one of those things that I know we NEED to do.. but 1) I don't know how to use excel, 2) we're both scared out of our minds to see where the moneys go! 3) Hubs will whine and complain about it, if I ever get him to do it!We have been credit card debt free until THIS SUMMER.. then all the things happened at once. Boo..BUT, I do need to keep track of our medical expenses, yo.. that's more dollah bills on the refund, yo!

I have been doing this for the last few years and it works great for us too. I try to enter all purchases on a weekly basis so I am not overwhelmed. Last year it seemed like we were spending too much in the food department so I started keeping track of every single food item and it is very interesting to see how much you spend on cheese in one month. We also came to the conclusion that it wasn't that we were over spending on food, it was the fact that kids were getting bigger and eating more.

hmmm...maybe doing THIS first will help my husband see where his spending goes, and come around to the geek-ish side of money with me. No judgment here. I am a Ramsey fan, but I don't do cash either. Cash is easier for me to spend on piddly crap and I can hide that expense, whereas swiping the debit card leaves a document trail to hold me accountable.

What I always have trouble with is when you go to one store and buy from multiple categories. How do you track that? For example, we were at Wally World the other day and bought - Christmas decorations, donations (for our deployed and Boy Scout food drive), groceries, items for a party (that we will be reimbursed for), stuff for my workshop, and a Christmas gift for the child. That's like... wait I can't count... six categories! So how do you figure out how to categorize that purchase? This is truly the only thing standing between me and a budget right now.